Pastoring the Pastor (Review by Timothy Raymond)

Pastoring the Pastor: Emails of a Journey Through Ministry. Edited by Tim Cooper and Kelvin Gardiner. Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2012.

Review by Timothy Raymond–

Pastoring the Pastor by Tim Cooper and Kelvin Gardiner is an outstanding little book.  In fact, I would make it required reading for every seminarian or young man considering pastoral ministry.

The book is a collection of fictional emails, primarily sent back and forth between Daniel, a young pastor in his first church, and his Uncle Eldon, an older, experienced pastor in the twilight of life.  The emails cover a wide breadth of pastoral issues including visitation, handling opposition, confrontation, guarding your heart, loving difficult people, dealing with anxiety, and maintaining one’s personal walk with the Lord.  I was surprised by how many topics were covered so well in a book of this size and format.

Pastoring the Pastor’s main strength is its raw realism about the difficulties and stresses of pastoral ministry.  Being a pastor is tough, and this book does not attempt to hide that.  I did not really have any clue about this upon entering the pastorate.  There are lots of times when you want to cuss, to quit, or even worse.  Pastoring the Pastor helpfully knocks the wind out of the sails of the overly optimistic, blissfully ignorant seminary graduate.  However, by realistically addressing such issues, the book helps the reader process the challenges biblically and hopefully become better prepared when encountering the same problems (and no doubt, they will come).

While the book is really excellent, two minor caveats are worth mentioning.  First, some of the details of the fictional situations are outlandish in a Chris Farley/“Tommy Boy” sort of way.  On more than one occasion, my wife caught me nearly hyperventilating in laughter as I read about Meredith the cat lady, the church barn dance or Sidney Snider’s charts for easy church growth.  While these make for entertaining reading, they boarder on the absurd.  Also, the entire book covers only about two years of time, which is a pretty brief span for a man to learn as many lessons as young Daniel did.  To be more realistic, some of the lessons described herein take several years, if not decades, to learn.  You sort of get the impression that after two years, Daniel will have smooth sailing for the rest of his career.

Nonetheless, Pastoring the Pastor is an excellent little volume on pastoral ministry.  I do not think I have ever read a book which more accurately describes the gritty trials of the pastorate.  And thankfully, it includes much biblical teaching for making the most of our trials.

Timothy Raymond is an editor for Credo Magazine and pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Muncie, Indiana.

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Born Again: God’s Sovereign Grace in the Miracle of Regeneration

While doctrines such as election, justification, and sanctification typically receive all of the attention in theological conversations, the doctrine of regeneration is often forgotten. Yet, it is this doctrine that undergirds the entire order of salvation. It is the initiatory change in regeneration that results in everything else, from faith and repentance to justification, sanctification, and perseverance. All of these other doctrines owe their existence to that first moment when God breaths new spiritual life into the sinner’s dead corpse.

Regeneration, or the new birth, was certainly important to Jesus. In John 3 Jesus tells Nicodemus that unless he is born again he cannot enter the kingdom of God! Jesus goes on to highlight the sovereignty of the Spirit in the new birth as well, comparing him to the wind which blows wherever it pleases. This reminds us that since Jesus’ interaction with Nicodemus there has been a long history of debate over exactly what it means to be “born again,” a debate that has preoccupied the best theological minds, including Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, the Synod of Dort, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, and many, many others. The key questions in this controversial matter are these: Does God work alone (monergism) to create new spiritual life in depraved sinners, or does God and man cooperate with one another (synergism), man having the final say in whether God’s grace will be accepted or rejected? Also, does regeneration precede and cause conversion (faith and repentance), or is the Spirit’s supernatural work in regeneration conditioned upon man’s will to believe? We believe Scripture overwhelmingly supports the former. Anything else would compromise the sovereignty of God and rob him of his glory in salvation.

Join us in this issue as we explore the doctrine of regeneration, a doctrine so important that Jesus himself felt it was the first thing he needed to address on that dark night when Nicodemus approached him with the most piercing of spiritual questions.

Contributors include Matthew Barrett, Thomas Nettles, Jonathan Leeman, Douglas Sweeney, Leonardo De Chirico, Andy Naselli, and Tom Ascol.